Real-time Raytracing For PC Games Almost A Reality

[safan80]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article...5&threshold=-1

Real-time raytracing has often been called the pinnacle of computer rendering for games but only recently has it been getting traction in the field. A German student, and now Intel employee, has been working on raytraced versions of the Quake 3 and Quake 4 game engines for years and is now using the power of Intel's development teams to push the technology further. With antialiasing implemented and anisotropic filtering close behind, they speculate that within two years the hardware will exist on the desktop to make 'game quality' raytracing graphics a reality

[BeardyMan]

could someone explain in noob terms :p

[Yakyb]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing

this is awesome do you think that larrabe will involve a form of this research or are we talking later than that

[railhan]

Google or Wikipedia can

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytracing

[Motiv]

Realtime raytracing is nothing new.

http://www.realstorm.com/

The demo scene have done this sort of thing for ages.

[onewingedangel]

Real time ray tracing gets exponentially more resource intensive as the resolution increases. To run at gaming resolutions (1280x800 and above) you either have to render comparatively simple scenes or have unacceptable framerates on current hardware.

Ray tracing performance does however scale very well with multi and many core chips, and going in order rather than out of order doesn't affect it too much. I think its obvious that larabee will be well suited to this task, and will likely speed up professional full precision rendering a good deal - quite whether it will be good enough for real time game quality graphics we'll have to wait and see, but my guess is not yet.

[iddqd]

Ray tracing is a hopelessly inefficient technique; we don't really have the performance to do it at any quantity approaching what they do in raytraced CG effects in movies. Real-time 3D graphics will be all about clever use of shader effects in the near foreseeable future. As it is now.

[Cybercat]

Real time ray tracing gets exponentially more resource intensive as the resolution increases. To run at gaming resolutions (1280x800 and above) you either have to render comparatively simple scenes or have unacceptable framerates on current hardware.

Ray tracing performance does however scale very well with multi and many core chips, and going in order rather than out of order doesn't affect it too much. I think its obvious that larabee will be well suited to this task, and will likely speed up professional full precision rendering a good deal - quite whether it will be good enough for real time game quality graphics we'll have to wait and see, but my guess is not yet.

Thing is, in the 2009-10 area when Intel will try to push this tech forward, you'll have 16-core CPUs everywhere, and cheap Larrabee cards available. Keep adding Larrabee cards and get a 100% efficient boost in performance, without any kind of SLI-like woes involving game profiles or that sort of nonsense.

Scalability is a huge thing, and with a couple (or even three or four) Larrabee cards, real-time RT becomes a definite reality.

[STEvil]

Wish someone would release a raytraced version of quake 3 so we could do benchmarks.

[SafeFire]

Raytracing can be thought of a bit like Anti-Aliasing in the manner of which it loads a processor, at lower resolution the load isn't that bad, but it increases meanfully when increasing resolution, sadly.

[strange|ife]

we are damn close. but i dont this being mainstream anytime soon. Maybe 2015 or what not.

[kl0012]

It is almost here.
http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1435623

Intel rolled out a new raytracing engine at the Games Convention Developer Conference (GCDC). Daniel Pohl aka "Elchtest", who developed raytracing engine mods for Quake 3 and Quake 4 in the past, presented the brand new yet to be named engine. The most impressing about the presentation was the performance of the new engine, which was able to produce up to 127 frames per second on a PC with two Quad-Core-CPUs.

[JumpingJack]

could someone explain in noob terms :p

Simply put, real time means occuring in a span of time capable of considering real ... ray tracing is an image rendering algorithm that produces lifelike images by calculating incident and reflected properties of photons incident upon a surface. Such qualities as reflectivity, diffusivity, absorption, etc. of the surface are accounted for to produce an overall image. As the name in implies, the path of a ray of light is traced from origin to desitnation or from destination to origin . In order to render a scene, it takes many many rays (or photons) to build the image.

Think POVray or current Pixar animations or the rendering of King Kong and the T-rex's etc. etc. , i.e. most special effects in movies produced today are ray traced via CGI in some fashion. This is why movie studios like Lucasfilms, Pixar etc. invest heavily in heavy duty rendering farms.

The problem with ray tracing is it is computationally intensive... as such, a single frame can take many seconds, minutes, hours or even days depending on the complexity of the scene. It has been scoffed at that real time (or visually compelling frame rates) would ever be possible. Hardware today is currently not capable of the computational demand to raytrace 30 frames in one second at a resolution necessary to be of use.

Today's rendering engines uses textures, polygons, and shading to emulate the interaction of light with objects by 'coloring' for lack of a better word each pixel based on properties specified by the environment. These give great images, and the quality improves with successive generations of hardware, but various details are lost in the process. There do exist various 'tricks' or techniques to improve say, for example, texture (i.e. roughness of a surface or such) with bump mapping.

Realtime raytracing though will enable cinematic quality gameplay if they can get frame rates high enough....

[EvlUndrWareNome]

Simply put, real time means occuring in a span of time capable of considering real ... ray tracing is an image rendering algorithm that produces lifelike images by calculating incident and reflected photon properties from surfaces, with such qualities as reflectivity, diffusivity, and such accounted for to produce an overall image. As such the name in implies, the path of a ray of light is traced from origin to desitnation.

Think POVray, or current Pixar animations or the rendering of King Kong and the T-rex's etc. etc. in movies, these are all ray traced. This is why movie studios like Lucasfilms, Pixar etc. invest heavily in heavy duty rendering farms.

The problem with ray tracing is it is computationally intensive... as such, a single frame can take many seconds, minutes, hours or even days depending on the complexity of the scene. As such, real time (or visually compelling frame rates) are currently not capable using a ray tracing techniques.

Today's rendering engines uses textures, polygons, and shading to emulate the interaction of light with objects by 'coloring' for lack of a better word each pixel based on properties specified by the environment. These give great images, and the quality improves with successive generations of hardware, but various details are lost in the process. There do exist various 'tricks' or techniques to improve say, for example, texture (i.e. roughness of a surface or such) with bump mapping.

Realtime raytracing though will enable cinematic quality gameplay if they can get frame rates high enough....

Maybe a reason behind the rediculous amount of cores that will be on a cpu in several years ? And resolution wont matter as much if its full conematic style quality.

[JumpingJack]

Maybe a reason behind the rediculous amount of cores that will be on a cpu in several years ? And resolution wont matter as much if its full conematic style quality.

Ya think?

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2006...allel_worlds/1

The beauty of this digital artistry is how well it scales - unlike raster graphics, which lose considerable efficiency as they scale over multiple GPUs, raytracing has been found to scale almost 1:1 for each additional processor it gets.

(go look at POVray scaling, for example, so long as there is a core available, performance improves almost 1:1 for each thread spawned.)

This is a fascinating industry, more so than many others over time, because different economic factors drive one way, demand for various usage drives it another.... and right now we are in a lull.

Back in 1985, the industry went through a big bust... a great deal of the integrated circuit products had already been made, built and satisfied the initial surge of demand.... something had to turn it around, then along comes the PC... bingo, back in business.... up through to the early 90's, where another downturn hit... ... what happened, the Internet and explosive growth from mid 90's to 2001 then the bubble burst .....

Fast forward to today ... with the exception of a few applications, computational power has outstripped software and applicability. Growth has slowed to a point where it is almost a commodity.

However, and this is my opinion, I think there is another boom cycle coming for the industry, CPU/GPU specifically and it will occur along several vectors -- first is portability, we have yet to create a great portable device (small enough to fit in our pocket) that does much good beyond a cell phone and calling your buddy. When shrinkage reaches a point we can put the power of a laptop into something that can fit in your pocket, then the mobile industry takes off.

The second is harder to see.... and this is really my main point.

There is a whole class of applications that many cannot comrehend until it is staring you in the face -- this is what separates critics from visionaries .... realtime raytracing is one of those. A new class of applications will emerge that will fuel growth, that for now has computational requirements so high that we cannot even produce devices to show proof of concept, hence give people something tangable by which to look forward to and see them to fruition.

There is a point in performance that must be reached before even the most rudimentary rev 0 of a killer app can be demonstrated (a hill to climb and crest before you can coast down so to speak), however once we breach that point ... watch out because the demand will grow and grow.... realtime raytracing is one example of what I mean.

When you see people debate quad core, can't use it... why do I need it... these are the ones who do not see much further than next week.